Collaboration Improvements

With today's update to collaboration, you can now create joint tasks that appear on multiple people's lists at the same time.

Toodledo was originally invented to be a personal task manager. Collaboration wasn't even an idea in our heads when we started. As such, Toodledo was originally designed to have a one-to-many relationship between people and tasks. A person could have multiple tasks, but a task could not have multiple people. This design decision permeated every aspect of Toodledo all the way from the database through the website and into our iPhone app and even 3rd party apps built atop Toodledo. Changing the task model to a many-to-many relationship was not a trivial task. Almost every part of Toodledo needed to be heavily modified and extreme care had to be taken to avoid breaking any existing 3rd party tools.

An analogy would be if you had a horse drawn carriage and wanted to add AC. You need electricity to run the AC, and you need an engine to make the electricity and you need a gas tank to power the engine. So, to add an AC you need to first add a gas tank. For the last two years we've been adding a lot of gas tanks. We've taken some detours, but we have never lost sight of the finish line. Today we are proud to release Toodledo's first iteration of a many-to-many task sharing feature.

There are now two types of private sharing. We have Workspaces which allow you to switch into someone else's list and manage their tasks (with permission, of course). This is what we had before, and it remains unchanged. The new, second type of private sharing is being called Joint Tasks and it allows the same task to appear on multiple people's lists at the same time. Any of the collaborators can manage the joint task and changes will be reflected on everyone's list. For each of your collaborators, you can customize how you can to share your tasks.

The core functionality of joint tasks is now in place, but this is only the first step. We plan to expand on this in future updates. We want to enable sharing in our iOS app, and via our API so that 3rd party apps can integrate with Toodledo collaboration. We also plan to make it possible to make joint folders and other ways to more easily share tasks and collaborate on projects.

We have also squeezed in a few smaller changes to today's update.
1) If you try to close the page when you are in the middle of editing a note, it will now prompt you to save the note before you leave to prevent you from losing your changes.
2) Task length can now be 2 decimal places long, so you can enter times such as ".25 hours" instead of "15 mins"
3) Evernote links in task notes will now be clickable.
4) When sorting your list by date added/modified/completed in reverse, the date added/modified/completed column will be displayed
5) Bug fixes

Wow huge update! Thanks for your work. I have been waiting for joint tasks AND Evernote links (heck that could be a post itself). You guys are excellent about keeping a constant stream of updates. Great service!

1)You can not share subtasks individually.
You can only share parent task with all their subtasks.
Will you change that in the future?

2)Testing new sharing (Joint task) i've noticed that when a collaborator remove sharing on a parent task, parent owner's task changes to unshared but not their subtasks, wich remain shared. I think that this is a bug.

@letitviv1
1) This is intentional. It will not be possible to share a subtask with someone who is not also sharing the parent. Subtasks go with their parent.
2) This sounds like a bug. I was not able to reproduce it. Can you please create a support ticket and list the steps that you took to make this happen?

@rmanser
When the task is initially shared, it will look for a matching folder by name and use that if it is found, otherwise it will create a new folder for you. Once a task is shared jointly, all of the fields are shared. So if you change the folder, it will change it for everyone.

hi,
thanks for the feature. this is a step in the right direction and I am glad that you are putting resources into this.

unfortunately, this does not satisfy my need for tracking assigned, shared, or joint tasks. I would like to be able to assign a task to my assistant, and track it in my task list. however, it needs to be able to show up, for example, as status "next action" for my assistant and "delegated" for me. also, my context for this task would be "@assistant" where her context might be "@research."

I want to be able to follow what she is doing, without it showing up as a next action for me or changing the context as it relates to me. I was hoping that having the task show on both of our lists would accomplish this, but I guess it does not.

I know I can just check the sharing list to follow up on her assigned tasks, but I want them to show up in my hotlist when I need to pay attention. in other words, I want it to remind me without me having to go look for it.

@letitviv1
1) This is intentional. It will not be possible to share a subtask with someone who is not also sharing the parent. Subtasks go with their parent.

this seems counterintuitive to me. I have many parent tasks that are made of several subtasks. I want my assistant to do one of them, but not all. some subtasks are clearly my responsibility, and some are clearly hers, but they belong to the same parent. how do you suggest we handle that? the idea is to not clutter up her list with subtasks that she need not be aware of. please reconsider this "feature."

We intentionally did it this way to make the initial feature easier to understand and implement. What you are suggesting adds a tremendous amount of complexity because we have to support subtasks without parents and parents with missing subtasks. We will consider it for a future update.

With today's update to collaboration, you can now create joint tasks that appear on multiple people's lists at the same time.

Toodledo was originally invented to be a personal task manager. Collaboration wasn't even an idea in our heads when we started. As such, Toodledo was originally designed to have a one-to-many relationship between people and tasks. A person could have multiple tasks, but a task could not have multiple people. This design decision permeated every aspect of Toodledo all the way from the database through the website and into our iPhone app and even 3rd party apps built atop Toodledo. Changing the task model to a many-to-many relationship was not a trivial task. Almost every part of Toodledo needed to be heavily modified and extreme care had to be taken to avoid breaking any existing 3rd party tools.

An analogy would be if you had a horse drawn carriage and wanted to add AC. You need electricity to run the AC, and you need an engine to make the electricity and you need a gas tank to power the engine. So, to add an AC you need to first add a gas tank. For the last two years we've been adding a lot of gas tanks. We've taken some detours, but we have never lost sight of the finish line. Today we are proud to release Toodledo's first iteration of a many-to-many task sharing feature.

There are now two types of private sharing. We have Workspaces which allow you to switch into someone else's list and manage their tasks (with permission, of course). This is what we had before, and it remains unchanged. The new, second type of private sharing is being called Joint Tasks and it allows the same task to appear on multiple people's lists at the same time. Any of the collaborators can manage the joint task and changes will be reflected on everyone's list. For each of your collaborators, you can customize how you can to share your tasks.

The core functionality of joint tasks is now in place, but this is only the first step. We plan to expand on this in future updates. We want to enable sharing in our iOS app, and via our API so that 3rd party apps can integrate with Toodledo collaboration. We also plan to make it possible to make joint folders and other ways to more easily share tasks and collaborate on projects.

We have also squeezed in a few smaller changes to today's update.
1) If you try to close the page when you are in the middle of editing a note, it will now prompt you to save the note before you leave to prevent you from losing your changes.
2) Task length can now be 2 decimal places long, so you can enter times such as ".25 hours" instead of "15 mins"
3) Evernote links in task notes will now be clickable.
4) When sorting your list by date added/modified/completed in reverse, the date added/modified/completed column will be displayed
5) Bug fixes

This a good job for business users (the main focus of the concept of collaboration). But do not forget the users personal (one-person-to-many tasks that do not use collaboration) and the various suggestions made by users!

It is good to see progress on collaboration. I have two major requests, one previously mentioned.

1. A User should be able to give someone the ability to change or at least add to shared tasks in the people icon.

2. I agree with the previous post that subtasks need to be treated on their own. My suggestion is that if shared it always brings the Parent with it. In project management if subtasks exists or children they are usually what is necessary to complete the Parent so it is natural that the Parent should always show and be brought along. These are two pretty signficant constraints but great start and thank you for pushing this along.